Luke stared in open-mouthed horror. Sarah? Trapped in that underground room with a cold-blooded killer? This was worse than anything he had imagined since seeing Matt Fulton gunned down. How could he be expected to function over the next few hours, knowing Sarah was trapped in there with this…this…amoral madman? Wondering what he was doing to her, how he was hurting her, what liberties he might be taking with her?
Again the stranger grinned. It was as if he could see straight into Luke’s head. “Who knows?” he said. “Maybe we’ll have us a little party, you know, just to pass the time.”
The urge to rush the man was almost overwhelming. Luke wanted to hit him, strangle him, to send him to hell where he belonged. Luke was willing to risk taking a bullet to the brain just to bring an end to this madness. He even took a step forward, his hands clenched into fists.
But then the stranger lifted his Colt and pointed it, not at Luke but at Sarah.
The gunman’s cold eyes locked onto Luke’s and he said, “Not one more step, friend, or your last memory of your wife will be of seeing her brains splattered all over the walls of this basement.”
Luke froze, his hands still balled at his sides.
“That’s better,” the stranger said. “Now, you listen to me. Don’t say or do nothin’ out of line, and both you and your little woman will walk out of this place tomorrow with nothin’ worse than a few unpleasant memories. But if you go to the sheriff, if you tell my old friends where I’m hiding, or if you say anything to anyone about that dead body you helped dump in the woods, the next time you see pretty little Sarah, you ain’t gonna be pleased with the changes in her appearance. Got it?”
Luke nodded, swallowing hard. A black despair unlike anything he had ever experienced washed over him.
“But there is a bright side. I was just funnin’ ya about getting close to your wife. She ain’t my type. Hell, I’ll bet she ain’t ever even had more’n one man at a time.”
“What? I never!” Sarah said angrily, her face flushed.
The stranger smiled, cruel and hard. “See?” he said. “Not my type, so as long as you do exactly as you’re told and don’t step outta line, you got nothin’ to worry about on that front. Take too long, though, and that could change,” he added with a sly grin. “My type or not, a man’s got needs, and like the sailors say, ‘any port in a storm,’ ain’t that right?”
The man’s mocking, teasing tone disappeared in an instant, and his voice turned icy. “So, do we understand each other, friend?”
Luke nodded, unable to find the strength to form words.
“Good. Now, come with me, little lady.” The stranger half-turned and indicated the earthen passageway with a flourish.
Sarah looked stricken. She stared at Luke with horror in her eyes. Then she trudged forward, head down, like a condemned prisoner walking to the gallows. As she passed, Luke reached out and gave her forearm a quick squeeze. She eased past the stranger without meeting the man’s eyes and then disappeared down the gloomy passageway.
The stranger winked at Luke and then said, “All you have to do now is close this here magic door, and you’ll be on your way to saving your little woman.”
Luke moved slowly forward. He was confused. There was no need for him to pull the lever to close the granite slab. The whole point of the design was to eliminate the need for a second person to be in the basement if a slave was forced to hide quickly. There was plenty of time for the stranger to pull on the lever and then get out of the way of the slow-moving granite block as it swung closed.
He reached the basement wall and stopped directly in front of the stranger, sliding his hand into the seam between the massive chunks of granite to locate the lever. As he did, the stranger said, “I ain’t convinced you won’t run to the law the minute this here door closes, even if I do have your beautiful bride with me.”
Luke shook his head. “I…what are you talking about?”
“How the hell do I know this ain’t exactly the break you’re looking for? Maybe you’ve grown tired of life with the ol’ ball and chain, and you see this here scenario as the perfect opportunity to kill two birds with one stone. So to speak.”
“No,” Luke protested weakly. “I love my wife; I’d never do anything to put her in danger.”
“You mean like letting her enter a sealed room with a man who just murdered a friend of yours? Like that?”
Luke’s face flushed red and he balled his hands into fists. He cocked his arm and froze as the stranger lifted his Colt and placed the barrel between Luke’s eyes.
“That’ll be enough of that,” the man whispered. “Anyway, like I said: I think you won’t do anything stupid, but I need to know you won’t do anything stupid.”
“How can I prove it to you?” Luke asked beseechingly.
The stranger smiled. “Luckily for you, you don’t have to.” He pulled the gun away from Luke’s face, drawing his arm out to the side. Then he pivoted his wrist and whipped his hand forward, clubbing the butt of the .38 against Luke’s head, just behind his ear.
Luke heard a sound like a thunderclap and a bright light exploded behind his eyeballs. Then everything went dark.
8
Jackson Healy was an expert at inflicting deadly violence. Killing the deliveryman who had been foolish enough to try sneaking up on him outside the Paskagankee Tavern was only the latest in a long line of murders he had committed, a string that had begun when he was just twelve years old on the Texas prairie.
But inflicting non-lethal violence was a different story. It turned out that injuring someone without putting him six feet under was complicated. He had succeeded in hitting the tavern owner hard enough to knock him out, as evidenced by the man dropping to the floor like an empty whiskey bottle.
The question was, had he killed him? Jackson hoped not, because he needed the guy alive and at least functioning well enough to open the hidden basement door after the Krupp brothers had given up looking for him and moved on.
From the darkness of the corridor behind him, he heard a gasp of shock from the man’s wife as her husband hit the floor. She rushed forward to tend to his injuries, and Jackson pivoted and thrust his weapon in the woman’s direction, not planning to shoot her, but assuming the sight of the Colt would be enough to frighten her into reconsidering her actions.
It was. The woman skidded to a stop. “Please,” she said, “please let me make sure he’s alright.”
“I’ll just handle that for you,” he said politely. “I’d hate to be considered ungentlemanly, especially considering how kindly I’ve been treated by the two of you.” Before he turned, he added, “And don’t even consider trying anything stupid, or the first person I shoot will be your husband. He ain’t conscious, so I’m not likely to miss.”
The woman moaned, the sound high-pitched and squeaky, like what might come out of a dying mouse. “You understand me?” Jackson said, and she nodded weakly.
He turned and knelt next to the unmoving man. The side of the tavern owner’s head had begun swelling and blood oozed out of an ugly gash. It flowed out from under his hairline and dripped in roughly equal proportion under the collar of his shirt and onto the floor.
Jackson didn’t care about blood or where it was falling. His only concern was that he hadn’t accidentally killed the man. He took a quick look into the passageway to make sure the little woman wasn’t considering doing something foolhardy—she wasn’t, luckily for her—and then he eased his head down onto the unconscious man’s chest and listened for a heartbeat.
It was strong and steady.
Then he felt for a pulse.
Strong as well.
The man would be fine. His brains had been scrambled a bit, but he would awaken in a little while, and when he did, he would find he was suffering from one hell of a massive headache.
But he’d live.
Jackson smiled up at the man’s terrified wife. “Your husband’s got one high-quality skull,” he said. “I’ll bet he barely eve
n felt it when I hit him.”
The woman shook her head and Jackson thought he could see tears rolling down her cheeks in the semi-darkness. He knew he should feel guilty for what he was putting these two innocent people through, but he didn’t. Didn’t feel anything at all, in fact. His only emotion was worry, because if the Krupp brothers got their hands on him after what he had done to them two years ago in Peru, he knew he would suffer in ways he could not even begin to imagine.
Why he hadn’t taken a few extra seconds to make sure Amos and Wesley were actually dead before starting off across the plains, he didn’t know. He had asked himself the question a thousand times. The answer, of course, was simple: he had assumed they would simply crawl off somewhere and die. They were miles from any civilization and suffering serious gunshot wounds. What other option had they had?
But he had underestimated their will to live, or perhaps their desire for revenge. The brothers had somehow escaped Puerta de Hayu Marka, seemingly rising from the dead and dragging their worthless carcasses out of the wilderness, and then finding some sympathetic South American doctor to stitch them up and send them on their way.
Jackson had been utterly, blissfully unaware of their continued existence for nearly eight months after sneaking back across the United States/Mexican border and making his way north. The pair had caught up to him in a boarding house just outside Wichita, bursting into his room one night with whiskey in their bellies and vengeance in their wild eyes.
And they should have gotten him, too. Jackson had erased his two former partners almost completely from his memory by then. He figured—when he thought of the Krupps at all, which was rarely—that their long-dead corpses were by now moldering in a couple of unmarked shallow graves in the plains of Peru. And that was assuming their bodies hadn’t been picked clean down to the bone by scavenging wild animals.
He had gotten lucky in Wichita, plain and simple. There was no other way to describe it. Jackson Healy had survived that night only because he wasn’t asleep in his bed at three a.m. as he should have been. He had bedded the wife of a local rancher when the man departed on what was supposed to be a three-day trip to evaluate and purchase cattle. The man had cut his trip short after losing most of his capital in a poker game and nearly caught Jackson with his pants down, both figuratively and literally, when he returned home early.
Jackson had barely had time to throw his clothes on and scramble out a bedroom window before skulking back to his room, angry and humiliated.
And horny.
He had hunkered down at the small writing desk in his room, whiskey bottle in one hand and glass in the other, prepared to drink his anger away, when down the street staggered the Krupp brothers, both drunker than skunks and brandishing their revolvers.
How they had located him Jackson had no idea, but Wesley and Amos burst into the rooming house and marched directly to Jackson’s room. They smashed the door in and proceeded to empty their guns into his bed, too drunk to notice it was empty.
By this time Jackson was gone. For the second time in less than two hours he departed a residence via a back window, and as shaken as he was to discover the Krupp brothers alive and well – and gunning for him – he decided he was getting damned tired of running away from people.
But run he did, with the Krupp brothers hot on his trail. They were relentless, single-mindedly chasing him around the United States. Memphis, Chicago, Detroit. Atlanta, Boston, Louisville. No matter where Jackson went, the Krupp brothers were never far behind. It was exhausting.
Now, though, Jackson thought he might have gotten his first bit of good luck since appropriating the golden disk and tube of life-juice from those crazy shamans two years ago in Peru. His plan up until a few hours ago had been to keep running, to cross the border into Canada—just a pistol-shot from here in Nowhereville, USA—and then head to Vancouver, hopefully shaking the damned Krupps along the way once and for all.
But finding the secret room in the basement of this dumpy small-town tavern had changed everything. He would never be discovered in here, not even by the Krupps, with their hound-dog noses, and once his former partners reached the only conclusion they could – that Jackson had continued north into Canada – he would bolt from his hiding place and reverse course. Backtrack. Maybe head to California’s Gold Coast. That was where he belonged, anyway, he figured.
But everything depended on the Krupps not finding him. Holding the tavern owner’s wife captive in the secret room was a good plan for keeping the man from talking; immobilizing the tavern owner so there was no way he could give up Jackson to the Krupps or the local law was an even better plan.
And he was executing his plan perfectly. The tavern owner was injured but would live. He would awaken in a little while and let Jackson and his precious wife out after Amos and Wesley Krupp had come and gone, and with a little luck, Jackson could finally get on with his life. He had yet to find a buyer for the massive golden disk that would make him rich beyond his wildest dreams; he had been too busy trying to stay alive with the goddamned Krupp brothers on his tail for the past year-plus.
The Gold Coast was the answer. He would find a buyer for the disk there, Jackson was sure of it, and now that he stood a reasonable chance of putting some distance between himself and the vengeful bastards chasing him, he might actually be able to begin living the lifestyle he had earned.
A greasy smile slid across Jackson Healy’s face as he stood and brushed dust from the basement’s hard-packed dirt floor off his trousers. He froze, though, and the smile vanished, as one floor above, he heard an insistent banging on the tavern’s front door, followed by a loud crash as the door was smashed back against the wall. A moment later, the sound of boots clomped across the barroom floor and a pair of booming voices echoed through the empty building, shouting curses and threats.
The Krupp brothers had arrived.
Jackson backed into the entrance leading to the secret room. He fumbled around in the hidden gap between the stones, finally locating the lever that would close the big slab of granite and seal him in. The door closed smoothly and quietly, and in seconds, a blackness unlike anything Jackson had ever experienced enveloped him and the tavern owner’s wife.
All he could now was wait.
9
Wesley Krupp stalked into the Paskagankee Tavern two steps ahead of his brother, gun drawn and ready to rain lead on anything that remotely resembled that devil, Jackson Healy. The place appeared deserted but Wesley knew otherwise. The Healy stink was all over the place.
Since being gut shot two years ago by the lying, cheating sack of horse manure who had then opened fire on Amos, Wesley had devoted his every waking moment to the extraction of revenge. The quest for vengeance was the one thing that had kept him and his brother going over the long days and weeks spent recuperating under circumstances he could now barely believe, despite having lived through them.
The quest for vengeance had kept them going through fever and infection, through choices made that were more difficult than any others they would ever face, no matter how long they lived.
The quest for vengeance was everything. It defined their lives and gave them a focus and single-mindedness of purpose greater than that exhibited by the greatest outlaws – or the greatest lawmen – who had ever lived. It had kept them going through their painful rehabilitation, followed by months trekking north back into the states and picking up Healy’s trail.
It had kept them going through disappointment after disappointment, the frustration peaking in Wichita, where they nearly caught the traitor, only to have the trail go cold again for three long weeks.
But Wesley Krupp never wavered. He never doubted they would eventually run Healy down like the cowardly dog he was. And when they finally found the yellow bastard, he would die slowly. Painfully. Wesley would make sure of that. Every moment of the brothers’ agony over the past two years would be repaid with interest, of that Wesely Krupp was certain.
And now they had found him.
The lame-brained coward—he had never been quite as clever as he gave himself credit for—had hidden his horse in the forest less than a quarter-mile south of here, fifteen feet off the rutted path that served as a road in this piece of shit little village. The saddlebags were still slung over the horse’s ass, and although a quick check of the contents didn’t turn up anything specific that would identify the beast as belonging to Jackson Healy, Wesley nevertheless had known it was his.
Who else would it belong to? No resident of this out-of-the-way hamlet—trust Jackson Healy to find the most obscure village in North America to hide out in—would have hidden his horse there, what would be the point? And besides, Wesley could just tell. The animal reeked of Healy.
Therefore, Healy was here. It was technically possible he had dumped his horse, then stolen another and continued on, but Wesley knew that wasn’t the case. The Krupps had been gaining ground on their prey for weeks, until by now they were no more than a few hours behind him. Wesley guessed they would be able to run him down before his arrival at the next decent-sized city, Quebec, and he figured if he assumed that, Healy would as well.
The yellow-bellied traitor had to be desperate. He knew he couldn’t run any farther, so he hid his horse and hunkered down somewhere, hoping the Krupps would assume he had continued into Canada. But Wesley assumed nothing of the kind. Healy was here—and by here he meant inside this God-forsaken bar—and he was going to find him. Tonight was the night his insatiable thirst for vengeance would be quenched.
He clambered across the dirty tavern floor, Amos right behind him, past tables with chairs stacked on top of them as if the proprietor had been preparing to sweep when he had been interrupted. “Healy!” he bellowed. “You can’t run no more, Healy! Get your sorry ass out here and take what’s comin’ to ya!”
Wellspring (Paskagankee, Book 3) Page 5